Adrian Barlow's blog

Thursday, 13 April 2017

Old Place, Lindfield in Sussex, was the home of stained glass designer Charles
Eamer Kempe. He restored this Jacobean manor house, enlarging and enlarging it again, to create a stately pleasure dome that dazzled visitors and led Country
Life to write about it no fewer than four times in as many years. Variously
described as a House Beautiful and as a Palace of Art, its contents and its
gardens reflected Kempe’s taste, his passion for art and for the past. One
dazzled visitor was the sculptor and writer, Lord Ronald Gower, who wrote in
his Diary for 27th September 1889:

'I paid Mr Kempe (the great
artist of coloured glass) a short visit at his delightful home, Old Place, at
Lindfield. This is truly a ‘house beautiful’, every room in it, even the
bedrooms with their quaint old ‘four posters’, their tapestries, and stained
glass windows, artistic studies one and all. [….] The outside of Old Place is
as beautiful as the interior, the effect of crimson from the Virginia Creeper
on the grey stone walls, crowned by picturesque gables, harmonizes with the
wealth of colour within doors.'

Lord Ronald (doyen of the Aesthetic Movement’s demi-monde, model for
Lord Henry in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture
of Dorian Grey) became a frequent visitor to Old Place, his name appearing
often in Kempe’s Visitors Book. In July 1893, when the new East wing had just
been completed, he noted that ‘Old Place is now one of the prettiest places I
have ever seen,’ but added– as if
reluctantly – ‘Perhaps if one could find a fault with this almost perfect house
it would be that it is a little over-decorated. The new drawing room is a blaze
of carved roses in scarlet and gold, with superb oak carving on the walls.’

Another visitor in the 1890s was Henry James, to whom Kempe had been
introduced through his friends Field Marshal Viscount and Lady Wolseley, near
neighbours in Sussex. James signed his name in the Visitors Book for the first
time on 8th March 1897, and it’s tempting to think he might have had
Old Place in mind when he wrote The
Spoils of Poynton, his novel about a widowed lady, Mrs Gereth, who lived in
an ‘exquisite old house’ full of ‘the things’, antiques collected from all over
Europe with which Poynton ‘overflowed’. While writing this novel, James had
provisionally titled it The House
Beautiful, the same phrase Gower had borrowed for Old Place from Pilgrim’s Progess. Clearly, Lord
Ronald had thought Old Place overflowed; he would also have agreed with
James’s description of the house as ‘early Jacobean, supreme in every part, a
provocation, an inspiration, the matchless canvas for a picture’.

Kempe’s friends would have had no difficulty in recognizing what
James meant when he said that Poynton was

the record of a life. It was written in great
syllables of colour and form, the tongues of other countries and the hands of
rare artists. It was all France and Italy, with their ages composed to rest.
For England you looked out of old windows – it was England that was the wide
embrace.

The windows of Old Place too offered a vision of England – and
explicitly of early 17th century England: rose garden, yew walks,
sundials. When in 1885 he held a grand
garden party, Kempe opened the gates ‘to all who would see the England of their
forefathers’, he and his friends dressing up in period costume to add to the
atmosphere. A photograph taken on the occasion shows them sitting, rather
self-consciously, as if for an amateur production of Twelfth Night.

Surely, then, Old Place must have been the model for Poynton? Much
as I’d like to say so, I cannot be sure, for the novel was actually written
between 1895 and early 1896, and I have as yet no proof that James visited Old
Place before 1897. In any case, James preferred to work from a ‘germ’, a single
fleeting idea taking root in his imagination and lying dormant until he was
ready to let it develop. He did not want to be burdened with too many external
facts as he planned his stories. I think it likely that he’d heard about Old
Place, probably from the Wolseleys, but deliberately abstained from going there
until the book was written. Poynton, as he describes it, is simply James’s idea
of a House Beautiful stuffed with ‘things’, not Kempe’s.

I’ve been writing about Old Place myself, for my book on Kempe. I
can’t help feeling, though, that it belongs more to the world of fiction than
biography. And I’m not the first to have thought this.In Kempe’s lifetime Hugh Benson, the Roman
Catholic convert son of Archbishop Benson of Canterbury, wrote By What Authority? (1904) an historical novel
partly set in a house directly modelled on Old Place. More recently, David
Smith’s Love in Lindfield (2016)
updates The Spoils of Poynton,
setting the whole story in and around Kempe’s home.

The BBC once serialised James’s novel; in Smith’s story one of the
central characters is scouting for locations for another BBC adaptation. Smith
is careful not to imply that Old Place was
Poynton, but he makes great play with the idea that since Henry James had been
friendly with a number of Kempe’s friends who were avid collectors themselves,
one of them could have been the model for Mrs Gereth. This is especially true
of Viscountess Wolseley; Smith correctly points out that some of her ‘things’
had been literally spoils of war, brought back from distant corners of the Empire
by her husband, the Field Marshal (Garnet Wolseley, lampooned by Gilbert &
Sullivan as ‘the very model of a modern major general’).

Kempe isn’t a
character in the novel, but he is a haunting, ambiguous presence in it.
Appropriate, you might say, for someone who slipped effortlessly between the 17th
and the 19th centuries, and who, shortly before his death, even had
himself photographed as the Ghost of Old Place.

[Illustrations: (i) Old Place, the East Wing (1891); (ii) the gardens and sundial of Old Place - a glass transparency (c.1908) (iii) C.E. Kempe photographed as a ghost (1907).

Monday, 10 April 2017

This photograph has puzzled me for some
time. A country church on a steep little
hill, with a river beside it; a service of some kind taking place in the open
air, conducted by a bishop in front of what looks like a new war memorial near
the church porch; the choir lined up on steps leading from the little lychgate.
Apart from the clutch of local dignitaries around the bishop and one family at
the bottom of the slope but within the churchyard, all the remaining villagers
are gathered in the open space outside the wall. Women and children greatly
outnumber men. The women, all with hats, are wearing what may be their Sunday
best, and the girls have clean aprons. A few boys stand on the grass near the
gate, watching proceedings; are those Eton collars round their necks? One of
them trails a cricket bat, though this is winter: the trees are bare, the
adults all wear coats and hats (of course) and someone is putting up an
umbrella. The date can be pinpointed precisely, for written below the
photograph are these details: ‘Feb[ruar]y, 26th 1909, Aldenham’.

Edwardian England, in the year my father
was born.It’s not a posed picture –
nobody is looking at the camera –
but in its way it is a portrait of a community. I had assumed that this must be Aldenham in
Hertfordshire, but Aldenham Herts. is a small town and it’s not on a wide
river. The Colne, which sidles past,
is little more than a brook. Ah, the power of the internet! Within hours of my
picture being posted on Twitter, I had learned where this was: not Aldenham at
all – but Clifton
Hampden, a village on the Oxfordshire bank of the Thames. It has doubled in
size since the photograph was taken, but still has fewer than 700 inhabitants.

Once upon a time I was fascinated by punts
and punting: I collected pictures and books, and took a punt out whenever I could.
Forty years ago this year, I even began to keep a punting diary, recording all
my outings. It is beside me as I write – and so are some of my most prized
punting books. In these, Clifton Hampden features frequently.

Clifton Hampden Br. Station: Culham, G.W.R., 1¼ m. Inn: The Barley Mow on Berks side of
bridge. Boatyard: Casey, at Bridge Toll House, will look after boats, and has a
few to let.

From Clifton Bridge keep right bank, but to left of
reed beds and islands at Burcott: then bad shoving and deep water to lock.

The artist George Dunlop Leslie,
whose book Our River (1881) is one long
paean to punting on the Thames, knew all about the problems of shoving on this
stretch of the river: ‘The punting here is peculiar,’ he declared; ‘mud is a
bad thing, but there is such a thing as too hard a bottom, for here the pole
rings with a clunk as it strikes the ground, and slips aside without any hold.’
But he admired the view:

At Clifton
Hampden, as if to make up for its dullness, the river suddenly comes out in
quite a novel aspect. For a short distance it runs over a bed of hard
sandstone; the little cliff on the Oxfordshire side, from which the village is
named, is of this stone, and quite unlike anything else on the river. With its
ivy bushes and small church perched on the top, it resembles some of Bewick’s
vignettes very strikingly.

Jerome K Jerome, in Three
Men in a Boat (1891) describes Clifton Hampden as ‘a wonderfully pretty
village, old-fashioned, peaceful, and dainty with flowers’. He doesn’t mention
the church; he’s more interested in the local pub, The Barley Mow, whose ‘low
pitched gables and thatched roof and latticed windows give it quite a
story-book appearance, while inside it is even still moreonce-upon-a-timeyfied.’ Such quaintness comes
at a cost, however:

It would not be
a good place for the heroine of a modern novel to stay at. The heroine of a
modern novel is always ‘divinely tall’, and she is ever ‘drawing herself up to
her full height.’ At the ‘Barley Mow’ she would bump her head against the
ceiling every time she did this.

John Ruskin visited Clifton Hampden, and if
he climbed up to the church he was no doubt horrified by the make-over given it
by Sir George Gilbert Scott. Ruskin’s views on church restoration were
uncompromising: ‘Do not let us talk then of restoration. The thing is a Lie
from beginning to end … It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore
anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture.’ But Ruskin was
more interested Clifton Hampden’s old bridge (originally Tudor, but also – as it
happens – restored by Gilbert Scott. Local people kept their punts moored under
its arches.)Elizabeth Robbins Pennell,
in The Stream of
Pleasure (1891) tells the story of how Ruskin, watching the sunset
reflected in the river, was distracted by a small boy he saw suddenly

run from one side of the bridge to the
other, and lean far over the parapet with eyes fixed upon the current beneath.
Of what was he thinking, this little boy? Was it the hurry of the water, of the
beauty of the evening, or had this speed and loveliness already awakened him to
higher and holier thoughts? And as Ruskin wondered, a boat drifted from under
the arches into the light, and the little boy, leaning still lower, spat upon
the oarsman, and dodged quickly and ran away, and Ruskin went home a sadder, if
a wiser, man.

I intend
to visit Clifton Hampden this summer. I may even call in at the Barley
Mow. But I shall definitely climb up to the church, and pay my respects at
the memorial to Lord Aldenham, designed by Walter
Ernest Tower and unveiled by the Bishop of Oxford on 26th
February, 1909.If you want to know why I’m interested, you’ll
find the answer in my forthcoming book, Kempe:
the life, art and legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe, due to be published by the
Lutterworth Press in 2018.

Friday, 11 November 2016

Wilfrid Parsons and my father had been good
friends at Theological College in the 1930s, and both began their careers as
curates in South London. Wilfrid became an Army Chaplain as soon as the Second
World War broke out, and after brief training sailed to France with the British
Expeditionary Force in 1940. Some time
between 28th May and 3rd June he was captured, along with
the remnants of his unit, during the retreat to Dunkirk. He spent nearly five
years as a Prisoner of War in various camps in Germany and Poland, even though
as a non-combattant padre he should have been repatriated at once under the
terms of the Geneva Convention.

He was my godfather. I never knew him well,
but I can picture him on a visit to our home. He spent most of the time sitting
alone on a deck chair in the middle of our large Rectory lawn, smoking his
pipe. ‘I can hardly imagine,’ (he’d written to my father in October 1941),
‘what it is like to sit in an easy chair, and as for walking out of the front
garden without an attendant I shall be quite lost! The greatest godsend will be
to be alone for five minutes. But it will come.’ It did, but it took almost the rest of the
war.

He was sent first to Kriegsgefangenenlager
OflagVIIC, in Bavaria, and it
was from there he sent the first message my father received from him, a card,
dated 10th December 1940, thanking him for a letter sent via the Red Cross. Thus began an
unpredictable correspondence, hampered by letters and parcels frequently going astray.
Twelve of his letters (including one Christmas card) to my father survive. I
have them now; I doubt if there were any more.

After a year in Oflag VIIC, Wilfrid was transferred to a huge camp in Poland, Stalag XX A/3, where he was one of the padres
officially approved by the camp’s Kommandant . Recently I was astonished to
find a photograph on the internet of Wilfrid conducting the funeral of a
British prisoner, under the watchful eye of a German guard. He was glad to be
busy, but it was reading that helped to keep up his spirits. Writing on 22nd
October 1941 to my father, who had just got married and was setting up home for
the first time with my mother, Wilfrid said,

I do wish I
could look in for a cup of coffee this morning, and have a look at your new
home and talk about bookcases and pictures. I can imagine how nice you and
Doreen have made everything. These things seem a long way off - at the moment
our bookcases are converted milk-boxes and as for an easy chair – well, I
suppose they do exist somewhere. But there are plenty of good books, thanks to
kind friends and the Red Cross.

I always associate my godfather with books.
He used to send me 7/6d book tokens every Christmas, and when he retired and
downsized, he bequeathed to me a revolving bookcase of his that, once, I’d
enjoyed spinning round – until I whizzed it so fast that all the books fell
out. While a POW, he would sometimes ask my father to send him particular
titles. Sometimes too he’d mention what he had just read. ‘Ah me!’ he wrote in
February 1942, ‘My youth passes by, and the affairs of the world come to me as
distant sounds of some dreamland. (Excuse the last sentence; I have recently
finished reading Fowler’s King’s English.)’

By the end of 1944, Wilfrid had heard he
was to be repatriated at last, but no date had been given. He wrote to my
father again:

The reading
ticks over … I received a batch of Plato, Euripides and Thucydides which I
should like to bring back, but I have got most enjoyment since being a POW out of Quiller-Couch’s lectures on ‘Reading’ and ‘Writing’ and other subjects
in English Literature. Well, here’s to beating this letter home to you!

The books by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (Q) my
godfather admired were collections of lectures given at Cambridge between 1913
and 1918. In them Q had a lot to say about war. When war had been declared in
August 1914, he had sat on recruiting committees back in his native Cornwall.
Yet he was scathing from the start about ‘well-intentioned superior persons
who, with no prospect of dying for their country, are calling on others to make
that sacrifice.’ He had no illusions about what was happening. His first
lecture in The Art of Reading,
delivered on 5th October 1914, attacked politicians who were already
‘perverted by hate’ and eager only ‘to invent what will be commercially serviceable
in besting your neighbour, or in gassing him, or in slaughtering him neatly and
wholesale.’

Horrified by the way, as he saw it, that such
‘practical science’ was sidelining the humanities, Q spent the war lecturing
his audiences on the importance of European literature, from Homer to Thomas
Hardy, and how it not only made life endurable during ‘the blank and devastated
days of this war’ but would be indispensible in helping to bind Europe together
once the war was over. I understand now why my godfather - Uncle Wilfrid as I
still think of him – valued Q so highly, and why he marked in pencil this
prescient passage from ‘On the Use of Masterpieces’, a lecture delivered just
as the Armistice approached, on 6th November, 1918:

This War will
leave us bound to Europe as we have never been: and, whether we like it or not,
no less inextricably bound to foe than to friend. Therefore, I say, it has
become important, and in a far higher degree than it ever was before the War,
that our countrymen grow up with a sense of what I may call the soul of Europe. And nowhere but in
literature (which is ‘memorable speech’) … can they find this sense.

Adrian Barlow

11 November 2016

[illustrations:
(i) Rev. Wilfrid Parsons, CF (Chaplain to the Forces), conducting the funeral
of a Prisoner of War at Stalag XX A/3. (ii) Wilfrid’s first message to my father, after becoming a POW.

Tuesday, 25 October 2016

I first read Trollope’s
Barchester Towers nearly fifty
years ago, on the island of Ithaca, while travelling with a friend during a
long vac. We had rented a little room overlooking the sunny harbour at Vathi,
the port to which Odysseus at last returned. The room had an en-suite of a sort:
you walked out onto a flat rooftop to find a privy and a shower consisting of a
head-height tap from which dangled a tin can with holes punched in its bottom.
The water was cold but, in the Ionian heat, welcome.

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) may have been
the first novelist to write about a shower. When Alice Vavasour, heroine of Can
You Forgive Her?(1864), arrives
to stay with her aunt in Cheltenham, she is hardly through the front door
before Lady Macleod starts berating her for having broken off her recent engagement.
Her aunt certainly does not intend to forgive her, and Alice struggles to
defend herself, after which Trollope’s narrator comments:

Perhaps it was
better for them both that the attack and defence should thus be made suddenly,
at their first meeting. It is better to pull the string at once when you are in
the shower bath, and not to stand shivering, thinking of the inevitable which
you can only postpone for a few minutes.

I came across this interesting analogy
while preparing a talk on ‘Past and Present in the world of Trollope’ to give
to the Woodstock
Literature Society last weekend.It
is always a pleasure to come back to Trollope; but when I mentioned this
lecture to an old friend, he replied , ‘Why has Trollope never quite made the
A-list of required reading?’ It’s a question to ponder. I raised it with my
audience on Saturday, suggesting that Barchester
Towers was possibly the finest comic novel of the 19th century,
and that two at least of Trollope’s books, The Last
Chronicle of Barset and The
Way We Live Now, deserve a place
in anyone’s Top Ten list of Victorian fiction.

Trollope himself is often held responsible
for his failure to keep a secure foothold in the Premier League. In his
posthumously published Autobiography
(1883) he had spelt out – much too bluntly for some – the economics of being a
novelist, publishing the exact sums he had earned in royalties and fees for
every one of his forty seven novels. Then, in describing his working methods,
he had startled readers by dismissing that idea that great writing requires
great inspiration (preferably to be found by a starving author shivering in a
garret); Trollope was unapologetic about sticking to a strict regime:

I have allotted
myself so many pages a week. The average number has been about 40. It has been
placed as low as 20, and has risen to 112. And as a page is an ambiguous term,
my page has been made to contain 250 words; and as words, if not watched, will
have a tendency to straggle, I have had every word counted as I went.

Confessing he had been warned ‘such
appliances are beneath the notice of a man of genius’, he cheerfully admitted
he’d never thought of himself as a genius, but was sure that, even if he were,
he would have subjected himself to what he called ‘these trammels’ because‘A small daily task, if it be really daily,
will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules. It is the tortoise which always
catches the hare.’ (Echoes of Samuel Smiles?)

Trollope is sometimes too hard on himself,
and no doubt some critics (such as F.R. Leavis) and some of his fellow authors
(Henry James, for instance) have been too ready to take him at his own
estimation; but his analysis of what makes for a successful novelist is worth
our attention. Describing how he came to write The Warden,
the first of the Barchester novels and the first book of his to receive much
recognition, Trollope explains how he wanted to expose – or at least to
describe – two contrasting evils. The first of these was ‘the possession by the
Church of certain funds and endowments which had been intended for charitable
purposes, but which had been allowed to become incomes for idle church
dignitaries.’ In the novel a young radical, John Bold, exposes the scandal of a
clergyman, Mr Harding, who lives comfortably as the Warden of Hiram’s Hospital,
an almshouse for twelve old men: shouldn’t these bedesmen have been receiving
the accumulated benefits of the original endowment, instead of the Warden?

The second evil against which Trollope
inveighs is by contrast the ‘undeserved severity of the newspapers towards the
recipients of such incomes, who could hardly be considered to be the chief
sinners in the matter.’ In the novel the Times,
disguised as The Thunderer, launches
a campaign so scathing against Mr Harding – one of life’s innocents, a man
devoted to God and his daughter, to music and to the old men of Hiram’s
Hospital – that he resigns, to the despair of his daughter (who is,
inconveniently, in love with John Bold) and of the Cathedral clergy, who regard
him as a weak-willed traitor to the Church of England for allowing its
privileges thus to be undermined.

Trollope wanted to see, and sympathize,
with both sides of the argument. However, he concedes:

I was altogether
wrong in supposing that the two things could be combined. Any writer in
advocating a cause must do so after the fashion of an advocate, – or his
writing will be ineffective. He should take up one side and cling to that, and
then he may be powerful. There should be no scruples of conscience. Such
scruples make a man impotent for such work.

But here I think Trollope is wrong. The genius
of The Warden, and what makes it
compulsively and provocatively readable, is that it does have ‘scruples of
conscience’ about both sides; this is what sets Trollope apart, for example,
from the Dickens of Hard Times or Nicholas Nickleby – Dickens, the
novelist whom he lampoons in The Warden
as Mr. Popular Sentiment. Trollope was almost incapable of seeing only one
side: when he stood for Parliament in 1868 he described himself as a
Conservative Liberal, and was roundly jeered by both parties.

In speaking last week at Woodstock, I
referred to Trollope’s own account of The Vicar of
Bullhampton, a novel in which he
does place all his sympathy behind a single character: Carry Brattle, the
miller’s daughter, whom he politely calls a ‘castaway’ but others do not
scruple to call a prostitute. This novel, Trollope declares, ‘was written
chiefly with the object of exciting not only pity but also sympathy for a
fallen woman, and of raising a feeling of forgiveness for such in the minds of
other women.’ He felt so strongly about this that he reprinted the novel’s
Preface in his Autobiography; but his
own final verdict on The Vicar of
Bullhampton was as absurd as it was unsparing, and, alas, did all that was
needed to keep this fine novel, and Trollope himself, off the A-list:

As regards all
the Brattles, the story is, I think, well told. The characters are true, and
the scenes at the mill are in keeping with human nature. For the rest of the
book I have little to say. It is not very bad, and it certainly is not very
good. As I have myself forgotten what the heroine does and says – except that
she tumbles into a ditch – I cannot expect anyone else should remember her. But
I have forgotten nothing that was done or said by any of the Brattles.

About Me

I live in Gloucestershire. Before retiring, I was Director of Public and Professional Programmes at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. I'm President of the English Association and series editor of Cambridge Contexts in Literature. My recent publications include 'World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context' (C.U.P. 2009) and 'Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning’ published by Lutterworth Press in March 2012.
I’m a trustee of the Kempe Trust, and write a Kempe blog about my research into the stained glass of Charles Eamer Kempe and his Studio: http://thekempetrust.co.uk
For (a lot) more about me, go to my website:
www.adrianbarlow.co.uk